Friday, September 24, 2004

Bloggers R Us

Ezra nails Kevin who nails Tina and her pithy take on bloggers, blogging, and the bloggesphere.

Ezra sez:

The interesting part of CBS's open wound isn't the Killian story, but what it reveals about the sad, defensive, desperate state of the media as a whole. And the role played by the bloggers -- all idiotic triumphalism aside -- is only hyped because they don't quite understand us and, because of their ignorance, respect the potential of our unknown power. What they are not reacting to is the actual competence or importance we possess. As a blogger, as someone for whom blogging has done wonders and taught much, I wholeheartedly endorse this paragraph, which accurately captures the nature of both ends of the blogging spectrum:

[Tina's Paragraph] Fear of missing the bandwagon is behind all the hype about the brilliance of bloggers who blew the whistle. You'd think "Buckhead," who first spotted the flaws in the documents, is the cyberworld's Woodward and Bernstein. Now the conventional wisdom is that the media will be kept honest and decent by an army of incorruptible amateur gumshoes. In fact, cyberspace is populated by a coalition of political obsessives and pundits on speed who get it wrong as much as they get it right. It's just that they type so much they are bound to nail a story from time to time. /quote

[snip]

...Nice to know we're read, but sad to know that this triumphant moment didn't even come from one of our number. We didn't -- couldn't -- break Abu Ghraib. We are not the wellspring of new media nor the providers of an alternative voice. We don't bring you interviews that bare the souls of their subjects and the only news we break is what you can logically deduce from public documents.

At our best, we have an informed opinion or entertaining take on world events. We have vibrant boards of interested activists that provide a public space for political speech and, sometimes, involvement. We have people like Josh Marshall and Juan Cole who decide to use this format to peddle their expertise, but could really choose -- and excel -- in any medium. We're smart guys at the bar and we hopefully, hopefully, make the political sphere slightly better for our involvement. Anything you hear beyond that is simply masturbation -- it feels good and means nothing.

1 Comments:

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